Keyword – semi-official press organs

Tamás, Ágnes:

“I am no friend of financial aids granted to the print press.”

This paper offers an analysis of the methods of press funding in the first few years following the Austro-Hungarian Compromise. It asks the question of whether the press politics of the era evinced continuity or discontinuity if compared to the previous period. It describes the different methods of press funding, including subscriptions, the dissemination of free copies, the newspaper stamp loan, the postal delivery cost exemption, deposit takeover, and subsidies. Its findings suggest that the Andrássy administration both inherited and modified the former system of press funding: it granted more funding to rural Hungarian and non-Hungarian newspapers, yet it followed their predecessors in that it subsidised some semi-official newspapers published in Budapest.

Keywords: Austro-Hungarian Compromise, comparative analysis, methods of press funding, press politics, semi-official press organs, subvention